PAPER DELIVERED AT THE 1995 AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION CONFERENCE

This use of southern images is ironic and suggestive, for, as one critic noted at the time Fables was released, "R.E.M. are Southerners. But then again, they're not."

Although none of the four members of the band were what you would call "native" southerners -- only Michael Stipe was born in the region, but even he lived outside the South until he was 17 -- from the beginning of their formation in 1980 in Athens, Ga., R.E.M. had been using the iconography of the South to construct and present themselves in public, and Fables of the Reconstruction was R.E.M.'s most explicit deployment of southern imagery.

This paper explores R.E.M.'s version of the South and their self-consciously adopted and adapted southernness, and interprets it, in part, as a response to a felt crisis of white ethnicity. At the same time, using David Harvey's historical-geographical materialist critique of postmodernism, I try to show how R.E.M.'s use of place and tradition suggests that within their obvious postmodern character lies a potential negation of postmodernism, a sort of neoagrarian structure of feeling which in its most facile moments is expressed as quiescent nostalgia, but which in its most aggressive moments attempts to promote a decompressed, human-scale sense of space and time.

I will end by questioning whether R.E.M.'s vision of Athens, Ga., and by extension the South, as a macrobiotic Mayberry offers us utopia or asylum.

FIRST, a brief history: R.E.M. -- a band which today is being canonized as the founders and patrons of "alternative" rock -- formed in Athens, Ga., in 1980. Athens, at the time, was a little star town in the postpunk-new wave new music world, made famous first as the home of The B-52's, Pylon and the Method Actors. Athens was a college town, for a while the college town, in a developing national music network of college towns, which was just then being knitted together by college radio stations and underground fanzines. It would not be an overstatement to say that the band was an immediate critical hit. Their first single "Radio Free Europe/Sitting Still" put out that summer was a top critics pick that year and was hailed as a great American punk single. Paraphrasing the Village Voice's Tom Carson, the single took the likable heritage of sock-hop innocence and jangly romanticism and made it seem undeniable.

From the start, R.E.M. was aware that for them to achieve success with integrity within a new rock milieu underwritten by critical discourse, they needed to annotate their identity and meaning for the press and their fans. It's hard to remember, but this was before MTV, before CDs, before VCRs were in every home, when the most ubiquitous visual was simply the album cover. For R.E.M. to negotiate in an industry and subculture full of dead ends and pigeonholes -- and ready armies of critics prepared to banish them there -- they knew they had to tell about themselves.

So what were they going to say?

WHEN R.E.M. started in 1980, their art was bound up intimately with a structure of feeling that might be referred to in general, using one of Raymond Williams' concepts, as postmodernism "in solution." At that time, for the most part, postmodernism was unnamed. The sensibility was, as Williams says of structures of feeling 'in solution,' "indeed not yet social, but taken to be private, idiosyncratic and even isolating." This condition was in contrast to the "precipitate" of postmodernism that became a dominant cultural style and concept by the mid-1980s.

In 1984 -- the year R.E.M. released their second album -- Frederic Jameson wrote that not all cultural production is postmodern, but postmodernism "is however the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses -- what Raymond Williams has usefully termed 'residual' and 'emergent' forms of cultural production -- must make their way."

Laurence Grossberg (1988:135) has suggested one source of the postmodern attitude -- which is characterized, apropos R.E.M., by playfulness, anti-narrativity, androgyny and indeterminacy -- is the fact that through the post World War II/Cold War era, people grew up facing the potential end of the world. As a result, he writes, "History -- both past and future -- is neither rejected nor challenged; it has simply become irrelevant, an unfortunate but inevitable entanglement with the 'cultural debris' of others' lives."

Whether or not we agree with Grossberg's etiology of the postmodern attitude, it is clear that R.E.M. initially shared this po-mo disregard of history and politics.

Stipe told a reporter: "I'm not willing, and the whole band is not willing, to throw a diatribe at anybody. Nobody cares, or nobody would care, about where I stand politically or socially or what my love life is like....That's what coffeehouses are made for and that's what coffeetables are made for. If you want to talk about politics or your love life or social problems or what it's like to live in 1983, then you should do it somewhere other than on the stage." (Sullivan, 1983:1)

Given this quote, it's hard to see what's left to talk about, And, indeed, that was their choice: to not say anything, to mumble, to valorize the static over the message. Stipe sang in an indecipherable idiolect, songs that were themselves collages of fragments:

As Pete Buck said in 1983: "We had this idea that what we'd do is take cliches, sayings, lines from old blues songs, phrases you hear all the time, and skew them and twist them and meld them together so that you'd be getting these things that have always been evocative, but that were skewed just enough to throw you off and make you think in a different way."

At the same time R.E.M. was trying to avoid literalness in their songs, they were striving for an effect in their sound and image -- and that effect was "southernness."

"We consciously tried to make a Southern record," Pete Buck said in 1983. "Not Lynyrd Skynyrd 'pride of southern man' songs, but a record that doesn't reflect a time or place; we wanted to make a record that is real individual, real personal that, by nature, is a Southern record. We also wanted something real Southern on the cover, very Flannery O'Connor."

He added: "We originally wanted to pick a title from one of Flannery O'Connor's stories, but that's a bit much."

That awareness of what is acceptable and what is "a bit much," indicates R.E.M.'s selectivity and conscious intentionality at manipulating Southern imagery. And the contradiction Pete Buck expressed regarding a southern record that doesn't reflect a time or place, indicates that the South for R.E.M. was not a specific, contingent historical reality, but was, rather, a conjuration of images, ikons and emblems, a post-South, if you will, that had to bush-hog a clearing among other southern stereotypes.

"I remember reading this review in the Village Voice," Pete Buck said in 1985, "that said R.E.M., who are supposed to be a Southern band, might as well be from Chicago. Now the Del Fuegos [who are Boston-based] they're a Southern band, because they write about driving around in your car and drinking beer and partying on Saturday night."

The burden of Southern history felt by R.E.M. was that of a media-made Dixie.

R.E.M.'s use of the South counts as an adopted ethnicity which derives in part from a crisis the band members felt regarding "identity." And, given the valorization of difference which also was part of the developing attitude of postmodernism, their identity crisis now can be diagnosed as one of whiteness, the ethnicity that dared not speak its name.

R.E.M.'s crisis in white ethnicity is articulated by Stipe in an interview in a British fanzine in the early 1980s. In explaining the "air of heritage in their songs" and the motivation for embracing things Southern on Fables, Stipe described himself as German, English, Yugoslav, Irish and American Indian, and said: "I think I'm probably searching for some kind of background that is there, but is still kind of buried. That's typical of the last century, especially in America. There's no sense of ancestry there -- for a good reason: they wiped out all the Indians. No one wants to R.E.M.ember that. If you're not, like, second or third generation Swedish, you really don't have much idea where you come from; unlike Europe, there's no long-standing tradition or heritage. That's something really lacking in American culture.

"I think a lot of people have built up this mythological America, and are sapping off that, trying to pull something out of that to make up for the gap in their lives. You don't really know what your grandparents did, or your great-grandparents."

This crisis in Stipe's self-identity is also represented in his refusal to articulate lyrics, with the songs intended to convey emotion rather than explicit narrative. In the early 1980s, this approach struck a chord with increasing numbers of white middle-class youth on the college radio circuit. At the beginning of the age of Reagan, when American society showed a marked preference for spectacle over substance, Stipe's pseudo aphasia was perfect

George Lipsitz has commented that while members of dominant social groups might not feel the same anguish of invisibility that oppresses ethnic minorities, cultural identity has become an exercise in alienation for them as well. "The collapse of tradition and the division between cultural commodities and social life make mass cultural discourse a study in confusion and conflict ... the postmodern culture leaves the residue of many historical cultures floating above us, ragged but beautiful, never quite existing and never quite vanishing."

Such was the case with R.E.M.. When it came time for R.E.M. to substantiate and articulate to the inquisitive critics what the band was all about, the residues of historical cultures floated ragged but beautiful above Michael Stipe, and he picked a cultural style that was thick in the air. To set themselves in hip opposition to the slick manufactured culture as exemplified by the British syntho-pop bands that were dominating the record charts in the early 1980s -- Duran Duran, Culture Club -- and also to express his own desire for a mooring and a sense of place, Stipe, as artistic director looking to present an image and at the same time assuage his cultural alienation, sapped off of mythological America and took up the authenticating spirit and style of a mythified southern culture.

Leslie Fiedler, quoted in Greil Marcus' Mystery Train, says "to be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history."

In this sense, R.E.M.'s choice of the South as cultural heritage and imagined destiny, is an adopted ethnicity.

IN the tradition of southern literature, the writers of the Southern Renaissance were praised by Cleanth Brooks "for their consciousness of the past's presence, alive and significant, in the present, a sense of lived history that gave continuity and resonance to their renditions, even of contemporary experience."

That historical consciousness provided continuity to the Southern cultural identity -- an identity, according to the standard interpretation derived from the official body of southern literature like Faulkner and O'Connor, which was largely a dysfunctional one shaped by the Civil War, Reconstruction, claustrophobic communities of grotesques, and an attachment to a mythologized agrarian past.

But by the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a generation in the South that no longer felt burdened by the legacy of the war and a colonized southern economy. The continuity was broken. The modern New South saw the emerging fragments of the Post-South.

If you live in the South, the mythical identity of the section can't be avoided. It sticks to your shoes like mud, and you have to scrape it off with a stick before you can enter any proper homes. What R.E.M. did was signify on this saturation of myths of the South. The aspect of southern literary tradition that appealed most to R.E.M. was the mystery of being, the spiritual origins of the gothic, and the dark, subliminal forces that haunt the margins of overheated consciousness, which fits with their very name R.E.M., the dream state during sleep.

They succeeded in their conjuring. Their 1983 album Murmur was called, variously "oblique, hazy, vague, fragmented, shadowy."

In R.E.M.'s early work, the ikons are obvious: the gargoyle on Chronic Town and especially the kudzu field on Murmur's album cover, photographed like a surreal dreamscape. For a while, kudzu was the band's totem: fans draped it from their bicycles, stuffed it in boxes and mailed it to friends. Kudzu is an appropriate emblem for R.E.M.s post-South because it screws with one's sense of place and specific geographical reality. Imported from japan to stop erosion, it consumes everything in its path, covers up any distinct features and renders the landscape indistinct.

On their second album, Reckoning, R.E.M. had cover art by the Rev. Howard Finster. For R.E.M., Finster became what Baba Oje is to Arrested Development: the wise man of their white tribe. Finster's hallucinations were intriguing and parallel in form to Stipe's own fragmented process of composition. Finster had sacred visions and painted sacred art that hauled Jesus up next to Hank and Elvis, and canonized Eli Whitney, Henry Ford and the Coke bottle. Finster's paradise garden became a shrine, and Michael Stipe went on his way developing his persona as a preacher for the Church without Christ. Unlike Finster's vision, Stipe's America was a place with no perfectibility, with the only value being the act of seeking and the performance of rituals of pilgrimage.

And after Reckoning, came Fables.

It was at this point that Stipe adopted the generic "storytelling" element, the southerner as raconteur. Explaining the title of the album, Stipe contended that it actually was "Reconstruction of the Fables of the..." He said, "The cyclical title, to me, really defined the whole entity that the band was taking on at that time. 'Fables" brings up the whole thing about storytelling, and that kinda ties in with lost heritage, the tradition of a story being passed on from generation to generation."

I cannot say anything much more than the crudest regarding the music of R.E.M. Mimesis, writes Robert Cantwell, is the power by which an artist generates illusion and music is the most mimetic of the arts, where the very act of hearing is an act of imagination. Writing about Bill Monroe's development of Bluegrass as ikonic representation of hillbilly music, he explains how music, like language, acquires a connotative surface. "Whatever the musical instrument, style, or kind, it will carry its connotative message into the music, linking it for that culture to particular times and places."

In this way, an artist constructs an "auditory order," a "sound," in which the effects belonging to the system of music are impregnated with auditory features culturally, historically, socially, psychologically significant, all proceeding from musicians whose actions and interactions figure as an important dramatic element in the meaning of the music as a whole."

Instruments like the banjo and the mandolin harken back to a hillbilly past. Cantwell says the bluegrass singer's style is the audible record of the conflict between oneself and one's moral endowment, so that it is style, not subject, that bears the principle burden of meaning. If this is the case, it's interesting that while bluegrass singers achieved their characteristic tense nasality by discipline, training, and a force of will that expresses their moral endowment, one wonders what it means that Michael Stipe often simulated the same moral tension of that high lonesome sound by simply pinching his nose.

REGARDING the politics of R.E.M.: The avowed disavowal of politics by R.E.M. -- besides being a symptom of postmodernism -- was also an aspect of the negotiation of hip at the beginning of the Reagan age, a reaction of some American youth subcultures against the overtly politicized and political British bands.

This was destined to change, for as Andrew Ross has noted, hip is "the site of a chain reaction of taste generating minute distinctions which negate and transcend each other at an intuitive rate of fission that is virtually impossible to record. It is entirely inconsistent with the idea of a settled or enduring commitment to a fixed set of choices."

The politics of rock have been much debated -- as a ground of resistance, incitement to riot, dogmatic indoctrination, hedonistic nihilism -- but the important aspect with regard to R.E.M. is the politicized method of production and distribution. Frith has written that "Cultural politics are about situation and not intention; rock takes its meaning from its conditions of production and consumption, not from the souls of musicians."

This political element is what gives R.E.M. much of their integrity -- they did it their way, working their way up from the road circuit and into stadiums.

One critic has suggested that rock's ritualistic chaos is allowed by society because within the mythology of rock there are elements which operate to deny rock as a potentially permanent site of communitas -- the myths that rock bands have short lives, the creative artist as self destructive, and rock's association with violence and debauchery.

That seems pretty dubious to me, but nonetheless, R.E.M. works against those old rock sins that seemed to subvert rock's utopian striving. Settling for asylum instead of utopia, R.E.M. offer what appears at first to be simply a sort of quiescent nostalgic communitas, politicized only by their cultivation of the college-rock shadow economy, and their refusal to move from Athens to New York or LA.

The band's manager, Jefferson Holt, himself a descendant of an old, prominent North Carolina family, said in 1989, calling up once-again Andy Griffith's presence that had accompanied them on tour four years earlier, that there is a "small, homey, hokey, Mayberry RFD kind of feel to the way we live our lives."

But Mayberry, as we know, has no black citizens.

And here we get to see how R.E.M.'s version of the South is a distinctly white, hillbilly one in which the band signifies on a 125-year-old American tradition of articulating a national culture grounded in a romanticized folk.

REGARDING the question of whites imagining whiteness -- the issue has for long been the province of white supremacists, segregationists or hyperliberal apologists. They were the only ones who spoke it outloud. Equalitarians repenting from the supremacist position respond by erasure and denial, and white ethnicity was consigned to places where its articulation was expressed in coded, embedded ways through the manipulation of images and iconography. And it got to the point where, as Judith Levine wrote in a recent Voice Literary Supplement, that "Whiteness is the most obscure difference of all because it is not considered a difference."

Andrew Ross has discussed the links between hipness and race, noting that by the end of the 1950s the white minority taste for R&B took on an openly political connotation. The taste for black music was partly an expression of "solidarity with the social and political aspirations of black people." By the end of the 1960s, being hip no longer required a "wholesale identification" with black culture, but began to involve a set of "alternative taste codes fashioned in opposition to the straight world," which included a critique of the pop culture industry, emphasizing authenticity as opposition to manufactured culture. For R.E.M. and the punk era, that critique was distended and expressed as the virtue of naivete -- all you need are three chords and a six pack of beer.

With R.E.M. there is a pattern similar to what Dick Hebdige wrote about between punk and reggae in England in the 1970s. "The succession of white subcultural forms can be read as a series of deep structural adaptations which symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community. It is on the plane of aesthetics: in dress, dance, music; in the whole rhetoric of style, that we find the dialogue between black and white most subtly and comprehensively recorded, albeit in code."

Against soul and reggae, white glam rock developed in the early '70s, representing escape, disinterest in politics and social issues, but instead interested in forms of celebrity and stardom. shifted interest from race and class, to sexuality and gender.

Punk rhetoric and style developed as critique of glam rock's ornate style. Punk was attracted to reggae, but there was the "virtual impossibility of authentic white identification" with reggae. The West Indian immigrants were an "alien essence" that threatened British culture from within, and so it resonated with the punks' values of anarchy and decline. For Hebdige, the punk aesthetic can be read in part as a white translation of this black ethnicity: Reggae represented a "present absence" against which the punks defined themselves.

So too is black America a present absence in the music of R.E.M. and their selective adaptation of southern imagery. And so too can R.E.M.'s post-southern cracker image be seen as a white translation of black ethnicity -- in a way homologous, again, with Arrested Development's neotribalism.

DESPERATELY seeking substance in R.E.M.'s situational politics, I now turn to the geographer David Harvey. He writes that postmodernism in a historical context is seen as part of a history of successive waves of time-space compression generated out of the pressures of capital accumulation with its perpetual search to annihilate space through time and reduce turnover time. He says any critique of postmodernism must "take its geography seriously," becoming, in fact, a historical-geographical materialism.

Using some of Harvey's ideas, there might be a way to view some parts of R.E.M.'s activity and image as having passed through the force field of postmodernism, and emerging as hints toward recuperation of some tendencies which focus on the issue of space and time, and their decompression and deceleration.

Harvey notes two divergent sociological effects of the disruptive spatiality triumphing over the coherence of perspective and narrative. First is the tendency to take advantage of all the divergent possibilities by "cultivating a whole series of simulacra as milieu of escape, fantasy, and distraction." But we also encounter the opposite reaction: the search for personal or collective identity, "the search for secure moorings in a shifting world." This is the trajectory of the band -- they have come from postmodern fragmentation back toward narrative and localized place. And they've done this, ironically, by appropriating imagery that had been unleashed by the postmodern economy of signs.

By seizing on the South first, they worked through the iconography, to a deeper level of valuing the more abstract idea of place, locality, and the values of sustainability. They have shown a new hope for rock's political potential by working through creation of a structure of feeling based on place, health, localized political involvement and environmental responsibility. Harvey's mapped correction of postmodernism seems to be almost encapsulated in the lyrics of one of R.E.M.'s most popular throwaway pop hits, "Stand":

[Play "Stand" here]

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